Prosodic cues for rated politeness in Japanese speech

In order to examine potential acoustic cues for politeness in Japanese spee ch, F0 and temporal aspects of polite and casual utterances of two question sentences spoken:by 6 male native speakers were acoustically analysed. The analysis showed that F0 movement of the final part of utterances and speec h rate of utterance were consistently differently used in these different s peaking styles across all the speakers. Perceptual experiments with listene rs confirmed that these acoustic variables, which were manipulated using di gital resynthesis, had an impact on politeness perception. It was shown tha t how the final intonation of a sentence is spoken had a great impact on po liteness judgements. In some cases the duration and F0 characteristics of t he final vowel did change the overall impression of the utterance's politen ess. An experiment which used speech rate variations of a polite utterance showed the important role of this variable in perceived politeness. Politen ess ratings showed an inverted U-shape as a function of speech rate, but di ffered according to particular speakers. The speech rate of listeners was f ound to affect their utterance rate preference; listeners preferred rates c lose to their own. These findings suggest that listener characteristics sho uld be considered important in politeness speech research. (C) 2000 Elsevie r Science B.V. All rights reserved.